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a post for the work-from-home parent

I wholeheartedly embrace the fact that I’m a work-from-home parent. I wear my yoga pants more often than not and I hole up in my little office, creating, dreaming, visioning. Rarely do I have an uninterrupted hour to myself because I work is home and home is work (and two little munchkins vie for my attention at all hours of the day).

It’s hard.

But I wouldn’t trade it for the world, even if it does mean that I have to be creative so the fluid boundary lines between motherhood and writing provide a wee little bit of sanity. So, as per the usual, I’ve got some thoughts for those of you who are work-from-home parents, featured last week on For Her. You can check out the first part below or click here to read the full article:

By the end of the day, I could only laugh. A snow day in Seattle and everything—and I mean everything—was canceled. Administrators canceled school. Childcare workers canceled childcare. Community centers canceled playtime. With a 2000-word article and a two-year old who decided to try and potty train himself that day, my sole response was laughter.

Because how am I supposed to get done all that needs to get done when I work from home? Is it legal for Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood to babysit my children for upwards of five, six hours on snowed-in days?

I know I’m not alone. Just recently, The New Yorker produced a satire piece on the foibles of working from home, and The New York Times featured a piece on the perks of companies offering flexible work hours for women. For work-at-home mothers, the conversation is critical: How do we successfully navigate the divide between home and work, when work is home, and home is work? We yearn for boundaries, but we don’t necessarily know how to get there without running ourselves into the ground, a basket case of stress by the end of the day.